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Here's how Lawrence Weschler sees it: "The world as it is," he writes in his 2004 collection of essays and reportage, "Vermeer in Bosnia," "is overdetermined: the web of all those interrelationships is dense to the point of saturation. . . . If I were somehow to be forced to write a fiction about, say, a make-believe Caribbean island, I wouldn't know where to put it, because the Caribbean as it is is already full -- there's no room in it for any fictional islands. Dropping one in there would provoke a tidal wave, and all other places would be swept away." What Weschler's getting at is the density of everything, the way our lives, the...

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Here's how Lawrence Weschler sees it: "The world as it is," he writes in his 2004 collection of essays and reportage, "Vermeer in Bosnia," "is overdetermined: the web of all those interrelationships is dense to the point of...